Tag Archives: Freelancing

Recap: Freelancing Advice from the Cabot Prize Panel

By Camilo H. Smith

 

Four  award-winning journalists working in Latin America joined Maria Moors Cabot Prize director Joshua Friedman in October for a panel discussion on the challenges of working as an independent journalist. The event was moderated by Sandro Mairata (J ´11).  The panelists offered advice on thriving as a U.S.  journalist abroad and the economic challenges such a venture entails. Accounts of covering government corruption, censorship and violence filled  the discussion.  These topics make up much of the work of the Cabot award winners on the panel, which included Norman Gall, Tyler Bridges (above), Joaquim Ibarz and Carlos Fernando Chamorro.The idea of sacrificing for your craft was repeated during the panel, especially from expat journalists such as Bridges and Gall. It’s a challenge that´s shaped by every reporter´s own path, said Bridges.

With so many mainstream publications cutting back their Latin America coverage, the time is ripe for freelancers to make a go at it alone. ¨What you want to try to do is have some regular gigs, so that the Miami Herald or New York Times might call you.,¨ Bridges said.

CUNAHJ Panel: Freelancing Latin America

Freelancing in Latin America
featuring Seth Kugel (The New York Times’ current Frugal Traveler),
Juan Manuel Robles (Peruvian magazine writer and editor), and the J-School’s own Sandro Mairata, Manuel Rueda, and Camilo Smith

Do you dream of traveling through Latin America as a freelance journalist? Don’t know where to start? Current J-School students and freelance veterans SANDRO MAIRATA (has written for Peruvian and international magazines), MANUEL RUEDA (has broad experience in radio broadcast working from Colombia) and CAMILO SMITH (has extensively covered Mexican hip hop for print and his own online venture) will give practical tips and talk about pitching and selling their work to US outlets.

The students will share a panel with two young and distinguished journalists who will also tell it like it is: JUAN MANUEL ROBLES, a magazine writer and editor from Lima who is pursuing a creative writing degree at NYU, and SETH KUGEL, longtime freelancer for The New York Times and GlobalPost, among others, who is currently traveling all over the Americas on a budget as the Times’ new daring Frugal Traveler.

More about some of the panelists:

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